Apologies if this has been noted previously.
This was a drug importation prosecution. The defendant initially pled guilty and, in reply to the court, said she had not been threatened or forced to plead guilty. Later, she withdrew her plea and went to trial. She claimed that she was threatened with harm if she did not bring the drugs into the country. She testified.
On cross, the AUSA confronted her with her statement at the plea. But he read only part of the question, which made it appear that she had testified that the had not been threatened to commit the crime. Defendant then answered "yes" when asked if she had lied at the plea hearing (the jury did not know it was a plea hearing).
After the defense lawyer learned of the distortion, he successfully moved for a mistrial. The trial judge concluded that the damage could not be undone.
The defendant appealed the denial of her double jeopardy claim and lost in the circuit, but the court criticized the prosecutor by name in its first (January 2012) opinion. The government moved to delete his name. The February opinion amended the earlier opinion to explain why the court would not remove his name, which appears throughout, and criticized the effort to delete it. It directed the lower court to consider sanctions.
The AUSA claimed his reading of the plea question was plausible. Among other things, the court wrote:
"AUSA Jerry Albert represented to the trial court an altered version of the dialogue between the court and a witness at a hearing which had taken place in that same federal court. He presented a falsified version of an exchange as the true recitation of the transcript, until caught out by defense counsel. He did so to make it seem to the jury as if Lopez–Avila had lied under oath about being threatened to commit the cocaine possession crime, when she had plainly responded to a magistrate judge's question about whether she had been threatened to enter a plea of guilty. It is hard to see--and, from our vantage point as an appellate tribunal, we do not see--how a prosecutor could interpret a magistrate's question, 'Has anyone threatened you or forced you to plead guilty?', asked at a run-of-the-mill guilty plea hearing, to mean 'Has anyone threatened you to commit this offense or forced you to plead guilty?'”